Gordon pleads for one last chance from the girls

10 June 2009

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Melissa Kite says that the PM is ill at ease with female colleagues. No surprise that it was the women — Blears, Flint, Kennedy — who rebelled while the men hid under the table

Of course her attack on Mr Brown was ethically ridiculous. Anyone who pours themselves into a scarlet satin dress and extreme heels for a photo shoot is on a sticky wicket in complaining about their boss using them for ‘window-dressing’. But no matter. She had at least gone down fighting when the massed ranks of male Labour MPs cowered behind her, blubbing about how Brown might hurt them.

After the cashmere coup of last year, when Siobhain McDonagh and others called for ballot papers, and now the revenge of the Wags, or Women Against Gordon, Mr Brown will surely be learning something.

In his speech to the Parliamentary Labour Party meeting on Monday night — ‘I have my weaknesses. I know I need to improve. I know I’ve got to keep learning’ — the Prime Minister did sound as though he were standing on the doorstep begging for one last chance after a fraught domestic row.

Behind the scenes, it was said, the rebels had been ‘terrorised’ into submission, the silence of previously vocal MPs was deafening. It was a female minister again who dared to try to reignite the plot as it fizzled in another outbreak of male squeamishness. Refusing to swear an oath of loyalty demanded by Downing Street, Jane Kennedy, the farming minister, urged colleagues to oust Mr Brown.

Perhaps it is a very modern phenomenon, or perhaps it has always been like this. It is the equivalent of the exasperated wife pushing her husband aside as he tries to shoo a dying bee out of the kitchen. ‘Oh for goodness sake, let me sort it out,’ she sighs as she squashes the poor creature with the flick of a tea towel before explaining that sometimes it’s kinder that way.

Melissa Kite is deputy political editor of the Sunday Telegraph and contributing editor of The Spectator.

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Waving not drowning

June 11th, 2009 12:29pm Report this comment

Ms Kite, you write:

‘It’s disgusting,’ said one. ‘It’s the ghastly macho culture in there. It’s all willy-waving.’

Question: Why do men obsessively 'willy wave'.

Answer: Beause they can.

Maria

June 11th, 2009 1:08pm Report this comment

"the undeniably clever Yvette Cooper". I'm open to being convinced but she has never seemed that way to me. Perhaps it is because she cobbles together all the Labour cliches when she speaks. But how are we to know she is"clever" if she talks like a minimally programmed robot?

Christopher Chantrill

June 11th, 2009 4:01pm Report this comment

I'd say this illustrates the difference between honour in men and honour in women.

Honour in men is staying in line with your brothers, no matter what. Honour in women is chastity, staying pure, doing the right thing, no matter what.